Ophelia's Muse

by Rita Cameron

  Hampton Court was famous for its hedge maze and its excellent picnicking grounds. Baskets were packed with a glorious spread: cold hams and wheels of cheese, fresh strawberries, a salad of peas and mint, and bottles of wine and beer.

  Lizzie and Rossetti rode in the first carriage with Ford and Emma. Holman Hunt and Annie Miller, on precarious terms since Hunt’s return from the East, rode in the second carriage with John Ruskin. Ned Burne-Jones, who came down to the city from Oxford for the outing, rounded out the group.

  The ride was difficult for Lizzie. The jolting and rocking of the carriage upset her stomach and made her head ache. But Rossetti tended to her lovingly, and, as always, Lizzie improved under his care, gaining strength from his attention. He measured out a generous portion of her laudanum, and had the carriages stop so that beer could be fetched from the other carriage to settle her stomach. By the time the party reached Hampton Court, Lizzie was sleeping peacefully, her head resting on Rossetti’s shoulder.

  When they arrived at the gates, Rossetti shook her awake. She peered out of the window as the carriage rolled down a broad avenue toward the palace. White paths crisscrossed the manicured lawns, and iris, foxglove, and lilies bordered the lane. The sun reflected off of the water of the curving canal that bordered the garden. The carriage rolled down an allée of trees trimmed into perfectly matching cones. The palace, visible ahead, was massive, built of pale pink brick, with hundreds of chimneys rising up from the roof against the bright blue sky. It couldn’t have been a more perfect setting, or a more glorious day, for a picnic.

  The carriages pulled up short of the palace and the party began to unload. Ruskin helped Lizzie down from the carriage. Rossetti offered her his arm and Ruskin held a parasol over her head as they escorted her through a small garden, dotted with stone sculptures and bounded by hedges. They picked a spot in the field beyond the garden and settled Lizzie in the shade of a great plane tree. The rest of the party followed behind, carrying the blankets and baskets of food.

  Annie Miller watched as Rossetti and Ruskin fussed over Lizzie. Lizzie overhead her say to Hunt, “Well, ain’t she the Queen of Sheba?” But Lizzie ignored the slight, shaking her head at the crassness of the woman that so fascinated Rossetti.

  They shook out the blankets and Lizzie lay down with her head in Rossetti’s lap. The sun shone down through the branches of the tree and played upon his face, and she was reminded of their one perfect day together in Hastings. She smiled at him, feeling the easy intimacy of their early days, before illness and the bothers of money and marriage and everything else had crowded out the thing that she had almost forgotten—that she loved Rossetti from deep within her soul; that she had only risen from her waking slumber when he had looked upon her and seen saints and angels, noblewomen and goddesses.

  He smiled back, and she saw him clearly, as if they were alone. Then her focus shifted and became hazier, and the faces of her friends seemed to glide by slowly and indistinctly. Her heartbeat, slow and regular from the laudanum, sped up, and her hands began to tremble. The dose was wearing off.

  She reached for the bottle and Rossetti noticed her movement. His face registered his surprise that she needed more so soon. Then he shrugged and reached out his own hand. He had started to take it a bit himself, just a touch here and there, saying that the opium encouraged his artistic vision.

  The picnic baskets were unpacked and they ate their meal on the grass, washing down the food with generous glasses of sweet wine. When they finished, they lay back on the blankets, full and happy. The talk was slow and idle, and Rossetti drifted off to sleep under the shade of the tree. Ned Burne-Jones had brought a small portable easel with him, and he set it up to make studies of the ladies, capturing their whispers and laughter in a series of quick sketches.

  Lizzie had almost fallen asleep herself when Emma’s cheerful voice roused the group. “I’m tired of sitting. Let’s play a game!”

  “Charades?” Ford suggested.

  “No, we always play charades. Besides, Hunt and Ruskin will pick the most obscure books. It leaves me quite out of the game.”

  “If you read more, my dear, you wouldn’t mind so much,” Ford said with a smile.

  Emma ignored him. “Let’s go into the maze! There should be enough light left to see our way back out, unless we get hopelessly lost.”

  “I suppose we should see it while we’re here.” Ford rolled over on the blanket. “But I’d much rather lie here and have Ned tell us what he’s working on.”

  Ned blushed and smiled, delighted to have the notice of a painter he admired. He’d said little during the afternoon, but now he rose to his feet. “Perhaps I can please both the ladies and the gentlemen. I propose a game in the nature of my new painting. It’s only in designs at the moment, but when it’s finished it will show the fall of Troy, starting with the golden apple of discord, tossed among the goddesses. I hope you don’t mind—I’ve taken a few quick studies of the ladies today for my goddesses, as I’m not often in the company of three women so clearly on loan to us from the gods.”

  “How interesting,” Emma said. “Do go on.”

  “It all began with a trick played by Eris, the goddess of discord. Eris wasn’t invited to the wedding feast of Peleus. Her feelings were hurt, and she decided to go anyway. She arrived at the celebration with a golden apple, on which she inscribed, To the Fairest One.

  “There were many beautiful goddesses at the wedding, and Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all claimed the apple as theirs. The goddesses asked Zeus to judge which of them was the fairest, but Zeus was far too clever to be drawn into such an argument, and to show favor to any one goddess. Instead, he declared that Paris, the Trojan prince, would be the judge. And that’s how Paris found himself tasked with judging among the beauty of three lovely goddesses, who each offered him bribes of earthly glories to gain his choice.”

  “It’s a wonderful tale,” Emma broke in. “But I don’t see how we should make a game out of it.”

  “Don’t you see? Here, today, we have three of the most beautiful ladies that I’ve ever laid eyes upon. It would not go too far, I think, to call you goddesses, and certainly you’ve been painted as such.”

  He reached into the picnic basket and found an apple, which he began to carve with a pocketknife. When he held it up for them to see, it had Eris’s inscription upon it: To the Fairest One. “Shall we have a competition,” he asked, “for the golden apple?”

  Emma and Annie Miller clapped their hands in pleasure, and even Lizzie was intrigued.

  “I’ll name each of you as a goddess, and you yourselves shall choose the gifts that you will bestow on our judge, should he choose you as the fairest.”

  He turned first to Lizzie. “You will be Hera, the queen of the gods, since it’s said that you have the bearing of a queen. Hera offered to make Paris the king of all Europe and Asia, and he was sorely tempted.”

  “I accept,” Lizzie said, with a gracious smile.

  “And you, Emma, shall be our Athena, goddess of wisdom and war, since you’ve organized our outing today with the skill and forethought of a general. Athena offered to share her knowledge of war with Paris, and the glory that would come with such skill.”

  Emma laughed. “I’m honored, though I’m afraid that Ford will protest my being named the goddess of wisdom.”

  “Nonsense, my dear,” Ford said. “You manage me quite well, and I’m a happy man!”

  “And finally, there is Aphrodite, goddess of love, who offered Paris the love of the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Oh!” Annie Miller cried out. “That was Helen of Troy, wasn’t it? Dante painted me as Helen, I remember the story!” She turned and looked triumphantly at Hunt, as if to say, see, I am not so simple as you think. But Hunt looked more pained than pleased.

  “Indeed it was Helen,” Ned said. “Although at that time, she was Helen of Sparta, for Paris had not yet stolen her from her husband and carried her back to Troy. Annie, you’ve been
Helen of Troy, and now you must play Aphrodite.”

  “Annie as the goddess of love,” Ford chuckled. “Now that’s appropriate.” Both Hunt and Rossetti shot him nasty looks, and Ford quickly changed the subject. “But who will judge?”

  “Ruskin should be our judge,” Ned said. “He is, after all, known for his good judgment in art.”

  “Oh, no,” cried Ruskin. “Like Zeus, I’m far too clever to choose among three such lovely women. I’m confident in my judgments on the beauty of art, but that is a far easier thing than the judgment of real beauty, which is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “Why don’t we make a sport of it?” proposed Emma, standing up and smoothing her dress. “Go into the labyrinth ahead of us and hide the apple in the maze. Whichever of us finds it first will be judged not only the fairest, but also the cleverest.”

  “A fine idea!” agreed Rossetti. “I want to see the maze before we lose the light. The rest of us can be mythical creatures, and act as snares and traps. We can try to turn the ladies around and distract them from their purpose.”

  “I’ll play the minotaur,” said Ford. He searched around in the grass and came back with two small branches, which Emma helped him to attach to his head as his bull’s horns with a ribbon from her hair.

  “Ned should play our honorary Eris, since he will hide the golden apple,” Rossetti said. “And I will be Pan, and lure the ladies away from their task with the playing of my flute.” He whistled a short tune and laughed.

  “Are you sure that your flute is the only thing that you use to lure the ladies?” Ford asked. He began to laugh, but stopped when Emma shot him a withering look.

  “And I’ll play Ares, god of war,” Hunt declared, looking irritably at Rossetti, “and make battle with anyone who crosses my path.”

  “And Ruskin?” Lizzie asked. “What role shall he play?”

  “Why, none other than Zeus!” said Ruskin. “I’ll roam the maze and make sure that the game is played in accordance with my law.”

  “Then we’re set,” Ned said. “Let the game begin.”

  The party gathered at the entrance to the maze, which was formed by dark green yew hedges that stood ten feet high, planted in a winding series of paths. It had stood on the palace grounds for more than a hundred years, but it seemed to breathe an even more ancient history, recalling the labyrinths of ancient Greece.

  Ned went into the maze to hide the apple of discord, and Ruskin, Hunt, and Ford went with him to take up their positions. Rossetti stayed with the ladies to ensure a fair start.

  Lizzie leaned heavily on Rossetti’s arm. The wine and the laudanum made her unsteady, but she didn’t want to miss out on the game. She was determined to find the apple before Annie could get her plump pink hands upon it. They would never hear the end of it if Annie were to win.

  After a few minutes Ned’s voice rose up over the tops of the hedges: “The apple has been thrown!”

  Emma and Annie laughed and entered the maze. Rossetti whispered in Lizzie’s ear: “The key to the maze is to always keep your hand on the hedge to your right, and follow where that leads you. No doubt Ned has hidden it at the center.” Then he surprised Lizzie by dropping her arm and racing off into the maze without another word. He ran down a long corridor of hedges, turned at the first corner, and disappeared. Lizzie wasn’t sure if he’d gone in the same direction as Emma and Annie or not.

  She stared after him, dismayed, and then entered the maze herself. The walls of greenery rose up steeply and engulfed her. All was silent; the hedges muffled any sound from outside. Lizzie felt unsure of herself without Rossetti’s arm to lean on, but she pressed ahead, not wanting Annie to get too far of a lead on her.

  At the first fork, she followed Rossetti’s advice and held to her right. The path ahead of her was empty, and seemed darker and more foreboding than it had at the entrance. She thought of going back and taking the other path, but when she glanced behind her she was confused over which way she had come. She looked up and saw that the sun must be very low in the sky; it was no longer visible above her, and the light in the maze was a hazy violet.

  She heard the sound of two sets of running feet very near her, as if someone was being chased. She peered up and down the path and then realized that it must have come from the other side of the hedge. She listened closely, and thought that she heard the sound of low whistling, but she could not be sure.

  “Emma? Dante?” she called out, but no one replied, and she decided to go on. She ran as quickly as she could down the paths, always trying to turn to the right, though she found that it wasn’t always possible. Or perhaps she was just confused; in the low light, and the fog of her own mind, she began to see false turns and shadowy figures lurking everywhere.

  She was turning yet another corner, beginning to despair of ever finding the apple, when a real figure leapt out from the shadows. Lizzie gasped and stepped backward. Then she realized that it was only Ford, with his Minotaur horns. “Oh, thank God it’s you, Ford. I thought I’d seen a ghost.”

  “Halt!” he said in a booming voice, trying not to smile. “None shall pass through my maze without doing battle. I propose a game of wits.”

  “Have you seen any of the others?” Lizzie asked, feeling too tired and confused for games. “I feel that I’m running in circles.”

  But Ford kept to his role. “You shall not pass to the prize without answering my question. I am the mighty Minotaur of the maze!”

  Lizzie sighed. “Go on then.”

  “If you answer correctly, you may pass in peace. Here is your riddle: Without you, I am nothing, and with you, we are one and the same. If you look closely you can see my face, but I haven’t got a name. What am I?”

  Lizzie laughed. A face without a name was how she often felt, looking at herself in Rossetti’s paintings. But it wasn’t a painting that Ford was after—she had heard this riddle before. “Are you a mirror?” she asked.

  Ford raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Correct. You may pass.”

  Lizzie begged him once again to point her toward the others, but he stayed in his role, and merely moved aside to let her pass.

  Lizzie ran on, thinking that she must be close. No cries of triumph had rung through the hedges. She was sure that the apple must still be unclaimed.

  Now the light in the maze had grown so dim that Lizzie could barely see a dozen feet in front of her. Had the hedges grown closer together? She felt tired and short of breath. She reached for her laudanum bottle, and then remembered that she had left it with their picnic baskets.

  She’d lost interest in finding the apple. Now all she wanted was to find her way out of the maze and into a comfortable seat in the carriage. She was about to cry out for help when she saw what looked like a familiar turning up ahead.

  She hurried around the corner, but she was greeted by another empty corridor that seemed to lead nowhere. Tears of frustration sprung to her eyes, and through their blur, she saw a moving figure at the end of the path. Could it be Ned, with the apple of discord?

  She ran forward, and was halfway down the path when she heard a low whistle and a high, girlish laugh. She saw that it was not one figure, but two: a man and woman entwined, half pressed into the wall of hedges. She heard the whistle again and as she walked toward them she saw that it was Rossetti, and he was with Annie Miller.

  It’s a mistake, she thought desperately, a trick of the light.

  The hedges seemed to grow taller and close in over her head, and the path felt as if it were falling away before her. Almost against her will, she took a few more steps forward, feeling that she was stepping into an abyss.

  Rossetti’s face was buried in Annie’s neck, and he didn’t see her approach. But Annie must have sensed her presence, and looked up. She stared straight at Lizzie with no trace of shame, and a wide, scornful smile spread across her face. Then she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and sighed with pleasure.

  She murmured something into Rossetti’s ear, and he tur
ned, startled, and faced Lizzie. She was rooted to the spot, unable to run or to speak. He spoke her name, entreating her understanding, but he was too late. The abyss had opened, and Lizzie tumbled into the oblivion, collapsing into a dead faint on the path.

  The moments that followed passed in a blur. Ruskin heard Rossetti’s cries and came running down the path. He stopped short when he saw Lizzie’s body on the ground, with Rossetti and Annie standing over her, understanding at once what must have happened. Their eyes met, and Rossetti’s face twisted with guilt.

  Ruskin knelt at Lizzie’s side. “Will you not be happy until you’ve killed her?” he muttered. Rossetti kneeled down beside Ruskin, Annie Miller forgotten for the moment. “I didn’t know that she was there.” Annie, realizing when she wasn’t wanted, shrugged and went off to find the others, to tell them that Lizzie had spoiled their game.

  The two men worked to revive Lizzie, but she didn’t stir. Her skin was white and waxy, and her breath was shallow. She made a pathetic sight, and Ruskin at last gathered her up in his arms and said that they had better take her back to the carriages, to see if there were any smelling salts. When he lifted her, he was shocked at how light she was, as if she were no more than bones beneath her gown.

  “Her laudanum,” Rossetti said, still in shock and trailing behind Ruskin. “It’s with the picnic baskets. That ought to revive her.”

  Ruskin turned around with a frown. “And has she taken any regular sustenance besides her laudanum? She feels as if she could float away at any moment.”

  “I . . . I don’t know. Not much, I don’t think. She hasn’t been well.”

  Ruskin let his temper flare. “You’ve let this madness with Lizzie go on for far too long, Dante. It’s obscene for you to be living with her without marrying her, and at the same time bedding every model you bring into your studio. No wonder the poor woman is ill! Who wouldn’t be sickened by such a display? She deserves better than this. Is she your muse, or your whore?”